The second change I want to mention is that we plan to adjust the role of Valor points. Valor (or the various other names that the currency has had over the years) was originally added to WoW for two reasons: it helped to mitigate really bad luck, for those times when the boss just refused to drop the item you wanted, and it helped encourage players to stay with the group even if they didn't need anything off the next boss.

Over time, we have felt like Valor has taken on too prominent a role, to the point that it risks becoming more important than actual boss loot. This is particularly the case when the tier sets are available on the Valor vendors. We think killing dragons and ransacking their hoard is more epic than shopping at the magic armor store, so we want to shift back toward boss kills being the primary source of epic PvE gear.

In Mists of Pandaria, Valor will be used to power a new feature that allows you to increase the item level of your existing epic items. This means that each week, you can become a little more powerful, hopefully allowing you to kill that boss that has eluded you thus far. There will be a bit of a game in trying to decide when to upgrade your gear versus hoping for a new piece to drop from a raid boss, but our plan is that even heroic gear can be upgraded slightly in this way.

We won't allow you to upgrade Raid Finder gear so much that it becomes better than normal gear, but imagine if you can increase your item level by around eight points. At this time, we're thinking there won't be gear on the Valor vendors at all, but we'll see how that shakes out. Valor will come primarily from dungeons (including challenge modes) and scenarios. You might earn a little from daily quests and raiding as well, but that won't be as efficient.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, I really really hate the design where becoming Valor capped each week becomes mandatory and I have to do a bunch of shit "for points" because I need to keep my gearing appropriately paced.

On the other hand, it is really nice when I can buy upgrades for the times when I've got some really shitty item in some slot and we haven't seen a drop for it in ages. I'll miss it for that... but then, we never had LFR before.

I think it's definitely an interesting idea. I like removing that particular grindiness from the game, which leads to a lot of frustration and burnout. Though it might just lead to grinding LFR, which for me is even more frustrating and undesirable.

On the other hand, if they follow the Cata model of distributing loot, it could become incredibly frustrating if they don't offer upgrades for all slots from boss loot. I know they're eliminating some slots for some of us, so that might help too, but I just remember how aggravating T11 was when the only dps wand for the tier only dropped off of one of the 21 trash mobs in BWD. Likewise, the only DPS caster offhand in T13 is off of DS trash. I'm sure someone (class/spec-wise, at least) had a similar experience in T12.

That's really my main concern with this shift, I think on the whole it should be a positive. It seems at the present that they're looking into it thoroughly as to how to best enact the change. Be interesting to see how it pans out.